Get paid to do quantum foundations

It’s not often that I get to write a post with a title like this, but right now there are two opportunities worth mentioning. Firstly, if you are a student looking for a Ph.D. position in foundations then Caslav Brukner has one available in Vienna. The advert is attached below.

Secondly, the application process for the next round of fqxi grants now appears to be open. I haven’t received an email from them about this yet, but I just noticed that the form was up on their website. They have funded quantum foundations projects in the previous round, along with projects on many other foundational questions in physics.

OK, here is the Vienna advert:

PhD position in the group “Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum
Information” (www.quantum.at) at the Faculty of Physics, University of
Vienna is available immediately. The student will undertake research on
the foundations of quantum physics and theoretical quantum information
in collaboration with Prof. Caslav Brukner
(http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Caslav.Brukner/).

Candidate is expected to have an undergraduate degree in Physics, Maths,
Computer Science or Engineering. She/he will be able to work
independently and collaboratively. Interest to work on foundations of
physics and experience in quantum theory and/or information theory will
be advantageous. Enthusiasm will be essential.

The position is supposed to be fully integrated into the Doctoral
Program “Complex Quantum Systems” (www.coqus.at). Applications, prepared
to meet the standards (http://www.coqus.at/index.php?id=333) of the
application to the CoQus Doctoral Program, should be sent to Canan
Goeser (Secretary) (canan.goeser@univie.ac.at).

The position is funded by the FWF-Project “Quantum Information:
Foundations and Transition to Classicality” of the Austrian Science Fund
(FWF).

A good way to find out is to look at the recent papers in quantum foundations on the arXiv. I don’t expect you to understand the entrie technical content of the papers, but if they are on topics that interest you then you can google the authors names to find out where they work. You may be interested in the discussion in the comments thread at http://mattleifer.info/links/quantum-foundations/ Off the top of my head, here is an incomplete list of potentially interesting places to do a Ph.D.:

Cambridge University (Adrian Kent and others in the quantum information and foundations group)
Griffiths University (Howard Wiseman’s group)
Imperial College London (Terry Rudolph’s group and Theroetical Physics group)
Institute for Quantum Computing, Waterloo (Joseph Emerson’s group)
Los Alamos (Wojciech Zurek’s group)
Nagoya University (Masanao Ozawa’s group)
Oxford University (Bob Coecke and Jon Barrett in computer science, Vlatko Vedral in physics, and the Philosophy of Physics group)
Royal Holloway (Ruediger Schack’s group)
Rutgers Univeristy (Sheldon Goldstein’s group)
Tel Aviv University/Orange University (Yakir Aharonov’s group)
Tsingua University (Giulio Chiribella’s group)
University of Bristol (Sandu Popescu’s group)
University of Maryland (Jeff Bub in philosophy and various people in the Joint Quantum Institute)
University of New Mexico (Carton Caves’ group)
University of Pavia (Mauro D’Araino’s group)
University of Trieste (Giancarlo Ghirardi’s group)
University of Turku (Operational Quantum Physics group)
University of Vienna (Anton Zeilinger and Caslav Brukner’s groups)
University of Western Ontario (Philosophy of physics group)
University of York (Paul Busch’s group)